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Academic Background

Biographical note - Mihnea Panu

MD (Bucharest); PGD (Oxford, UK); PhD (Birmingham, UK)

My interests lie in the apparatuses that shape simultaneously truth, governing and identity and in the tactics that might open new political spaces within these densely populated strategic fields.

My recent analysis, Contextualizing Family Planning: Truth, Subject, and Other in the US Government (Palgrave, 2009), argues that liberalism (the epitomal “modern” form of bio-power) is structured by unacknowledged foundational assumptions that are, among other things, patriarchal, heterosexist, racist and eugenic; and describes the mechanisms through which those assumptions shape the contemporary governing of the Nation’s health.

I am presently looking at the determinations between liberal-capitalist processes of identity-formation that operate, consciously and/or unconsciously, through compulsive investments of desire and a systematic “will-to-ignorance”; and the power relations that shape the bourgeois subjects’, and more generally the shared, reality.

Recent publications:

Governing ‘others’: the (m)other as subject in the US family planning discourses. 2010. Journal of Language and Politics, vol. 9 (2): 260-280.

Contextualizing Family Planning: Truth, Subject, and the Other in US Governing. 2009. NY and London: Palgrave.

“Subjectivity, State and Other: On the Limits of Our Political Imagination”. In Gurminder K. Bhambra and Ipek Demir (eds.) 1968 in Retrospect: History, Theory, Alterity. 2009. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

“Politics of ‘us’: on the possibilities of solidarity without substance”. In Nathalie Karagiannis. (ed.) European Solidarity and Solidarity beyond Europe. 2007. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.